If she was not chaste, not modest, and not a virgin, the ground would remain sealed shut and no glittering cavern would appear.
Svanvitha pushed her fingers through the tiny hole in the wall of her chamber and got the attention of her keeper. When he drew close, she cried, “Dear keeper, go to the king, my lord and yours, and tell him that his poor daughter wants to see him and speak to him, and pray that he does not deny her this last favor.”
And the keeper agreed, for he had never been completely convinced that Svanvitha was as immodest as the Polish prince had said she was. The keeper thought she was good and pure and that it was possible a terrible mistake had been made. But he was a subject of the king and merely the keeper of the tower. He knew he had to keep these thoughts to himself.
And so it was that the keeper went into the presence of the king, who grew wrathful when he heard the request his daughter had made. He cast the keeper out and said that he must not speak the girl’s name again or he would find himself in prison, too, and no one would ever know what had become of him.
So the keeper returned to the tower and told Svanvitha that the king had denied her request. And Svanvitha fell crying to the cold floor. But after a time she picked herself up and told herself that sooner or later she would have an opportunity to try again.
That night, the king had a very beautiful dream, which he could not remember when he woke in the morning. But the dream must have changed something in him, for he sent for the keeper and ordered him to bring Svanvitha before him. The keeper brought her just as she was, a thin girl with tattered clothes that hung on her like airless sails. When he saw what had become of his daughter as a result of her imprisonment, her rags and her wasted body, her pallor and her haggard face, the king went as pale as the whitewashed wall behind him.
Svanvitha bowed low before him and said that she was suffering innocently of the charges concocted by the evil Polish prince and she knew of a way to prove this and to improve her father’s fortune all at once. She begged him to listen. When he did not interrupt, she reminded him of the old legend about the ramparts at Garz, which said that a pure and chaste princess who walks the rampart between twelve and one on Midsummer’s Eve, naked and as God made her, will cause the earth to open and reveal a chamber filled with treasure. She wanted to say more, but the words stuck in her throat and she sobbed bitterly. But she saw that the king had been moved by her speech, or perhaps he’d seen a way to increase his wealth. Either way, he nodded once and said that she would have her chance.
Forty days had yet to pass before Midsummer’s Eve and during that time, the king sheltered Svanvitha in his castle. She bathed and had fresh clothes and ate the food he had prepared for his own table. She walked in the garden and took in the air. She watched the birds she loved and felt taken up by the wind that stirred her. She looked far out at the forests where she had played as a child and imagined herself as she had been, before she learned her true value to the king.
On the morning of the day of Midsummer’s Eve, the king had a servant deliver a beautiful gown to Svanvitha so that she could appear on the rampart in a style that befitted a true princess of Rügen. But Svanvitha told the keeper to put the gown away. She would ride to the tower dressed as a boy so there would be no danger of anyone recognizing her.
Just before she left, the princess went into the chamber of her father the king and bade him farewell. He bowed his head and wept, and she held to his knees and let her tears fall into his lap. Then she disguised herself for the journey to Garz, which she made alone and on horseback.
The road between the king’s castle and the ramparts at Garz was not long, and Svanvitha made good time. No one recognized her, so they could not call her the terrible names they had used when the prince of Poland spread lies about her. The night was dark, but she was not afraid and in the shadows saw the promise of her liberation. Never had the air smelled so sweet, and never had she looked on the cottages she passed with such tenderness of feeling.
When she got to Garz, she took the saddle and the bridle from her horse and laid these on the ground. She turned to the horse, which she had ridden since childhood, and rubbed his muzzle and whispered in his ear. Then she slapped him on the haunch and watched him gallop away into the night. She climbed the stone steps to the parapet, unbuttoning her shirt as she went, and loosening her hair from her cap. Then, as the clock struck midnight, she stripped and stepped out onto the rampart. She walked backward, beating the battlement behind her with a St. John’s wand, just as the legend said she must. She had not gone too many steps when the stone gave way and the earth opened below. As predicted, she fell as gently as if in a dream into a huge hall lit by a thousand lamps and wax lights, with walls of marble and diamond mirrors. She landed on a heap of gold but she was not hurt. She looked around in wonderment, for the room was filled with more riches than she had imagined the world could ever hold and so much that there was hardly room to walk among the treasure.
In the corner, the gray ghost waited but he made no move to harm her. Instead, he merely nodded as if he was happy to meet his descendant. And then he rose and faded and in his place stood a retinue of servants, who turned toward Svanvitha, ready to do her bidding. She was dumbstruck for a moment, but then she collected herself and showed them that they were to fill their garments—their pockets and their cloaks, their breeches and their gloves—with all the gold and jewels from the chamber. This they did while Svanvitha looked on. And all the while she thought how she would please her father and he would have to let her go free because she had proven her innocence and brought him great wealth. But she knew that the night was short on Midsummer’s Eve and she felt a great urgency to finish her task and lead the retinue of servants out of the underhall. And yet she wanted to make sure she brought her father enough wealth so that he would be sure to pardon her for the crime she had not committed.
At this part of the story, my mother always said that it is easy for a girl to start to feel guilty for something she has not done when everyone else believes that she is guilty, and Svanvitha just wanted to be sure she was never sent back to that terrible tower room. Anyone could understand her plight. Anyone could see that she had only one way out. She had to take her time and make sure she got this one thing right.
So it was that daylight had begun to break when Svanvitha started up the steps to the top of the rampart. She could hear the cock crow and she could see that the sky had grown brighter in the east and she grew afraid that the servants with the riches in their pockets would be left behind. So she turned to urge them on. But as soon as she turned, the staircase that had risen to take her to the door fell away beneath her and the servants and the treasure disappeared and the door above slammed shut with such a thunderous sound that she cried out. She fell to the floor, where she lay breathless in the dark. Eventually, her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom and she saw that a huge, snarling black dog stood on the stone steps and blocked her way.
When she did not return, her father the king decided that she had deceived him and had used the legend as an excuse to slip away. He ordered that she be brought to him the minute she was found so that he could once again lock her in the tower. But of course he was wrong.
It is said that poor Svanvitha stays in the dark, empty chamber to this day and she is not alone. The great black dog is there lest she should take it upon herself to try to find a way out. And, too, every so often a strapping young lad will go missing from the village and never be seen again. The villagers all know what has become of him. He is with Svanvitha, in the dark belowground. She might have been innocent once but she is surely innocent no more.
My mother always explained the outcome this way: You are not supposed to turn around and look back over your shoulder at the spirits of the underworld, for then they will have you in their power. You must never speak to them, or they will hold you in their power forever.
At first I thought she meant to teach us that we must always obey our father and never go a
gainst him and never rebel or disobey. Later, I realized she meant something else: Even should you obey your father in every way, he will still do with you as he pleases. And if you try to get away, you will be beset by things that you never knew about or dreamed. The world is full of rooms guarded by snarling dogs. If you do not wish to live in darkness, you must be prepared to fight with all that you are worth, for the world will never agree that you are simply to be free.
25
In early December it turned warm and then it rained and went cold overnight. The roads iced over, and black sheets of frozen water lay glassy on lawns and sidewalks. In the tearoom we had little business after two in the afternoon, and the owner put her coat on at two fifteen and told me to close up shop if things stayed slow. She opened the door and the air that came in when she left had the tang of snow.
Just before four, I banked the fire in the cookstove and turned the lights out and pulled the shades in the front windows so they rolled down to the sills. I took my coat from its hook in the back room and left it unbuttoned over my belly and stepped out into the snowy street. Down by the corner, a man in a long dark coat stood in the shadow of a building. He leaned and smoked and then cast his cigarette into a dirty pile of snow. He turned and looked up and stared at me as I came along. We were alone in the dim street and no lights shone in the windows overhead and no one else was near. Even the tavern lay still behind us. He walked up to me and said my name and looked searchingly at me. Then he fell to his knees and wrapped his arms around my legs and pressed his face into my thighs. We stood in the shadows and a cold wind came up. I shivered and then began to cry. He sobbed and tightened his grip and I lay my hand on his hair. The scent of him like the memory of a ghost.
After a time, I pulled away and he got to his feet and wiped his eyes.
“Marie,” he said. “Marie.”
I stood teary-eyed before him. Then I bit my lip and told him I was late.
“I am sorry,” he cried. “I am sorry. I am sorry.”
“Thank you,” I said.
He held my arm. “Is that all you can say to me? Thank you?”
“I accept your apology,” I said. I pulled my arm away.
“Then you will come home?” He waited. When I did not say anything, he said, “We can fix the divorce. It is only paper. We know how we feel.”
I shook my head.
“I have to go,” I said. “I cannot stand here with you.” I stepped away from him and turned to go up the street. A woman opened the door to the building on the corner and looked outside. She looked at us and then whistled and whistled again. A sallow brown dog bolted out of the alley and made for the stone steps. When the dog was inside, the woman stepped down into the street and looked up and down again, as if she expected something to march past, and then she turned and went into the building. The door closed with a thunk.
“Please,” he said. “Please.”
“No,” I said. “I cannot.” I remembered the feel of his mouth on mine and the weight of him and I swayed a little in the street, as if I would fall toward him and fall back into him and fall back into the life I had left behind. He caught my elbow and told me that I should sit down. But I shook my head and took a step back.
“You should not be here,” I said. “The judge told you to keep away.”
“But this is not what we want,” he said. He began to walk beside me.
I stopped walking. “August,” I said. “This is what I want. I am not going to change my mind.”
“But we have a baby now,” he said. He put his hand on my belly but I brushed his hand away. He flinched. “Everything will be different,” he said. “I will not drink. I will get used to being married. I will make sure you have what you need. So. Like that. We can go on.”
“No,” I said.
“You love me,” he said. “I know you do.”
“Yes,” I said. “Well. That does not seem to be the point anymore.”
The lamplighter passed and touched the street lamp on the corner with his frail torch. It began to snow. August looked at me with a strange expression, his mouth wet, his eyes shadowed in their sockets. The light from the street lamp moved and his expression shifted in waves. I did not see myself in his gaze, only his own desperate longing which could not be my longing anymore. Then I told him it was time for me to go, and he said that he would walk with me wherever I was going and keep me safe. I paused and saw that he would follow me to my little room at the top of the stairs and he would know where I lived. So I nodded and walked as far as the house on the corner, where I stepped up to the wooden door. Someone had painted it a glossy black and a tarnished brass oval was screwed to the center panel. I lifted the door knocker and let it fall three times. The sallow brown dog barked somewhere inside and the woman who had whistled for him opened the door. She looked surprised and said, “Yes?” I looked at her very hard and she looked past me at August, who waited in the street behind me with a distraught expression on his face. “Come in,” the woman said. “It’s so very good to see you.” When we were inside, she turned the deadbolt in the door and told me to have a seat in the parlor. Then she walked to the window and watched through a slit in the shade until he was gone.
There came a number of days when it snowed and snowed and business disappeared. The woman who owned the tea shop and I sat at one of the tables and played cards. She taught me to play double solitaire and poker. We bet buttons from a jar she kept under the kitchen counter. She thought it was amazing to see how many people lost buttons in her tearoom. Her name was Olga Jensen and she had come to Wisconsin from Sweden when she was a very little girl. Her father had died on the ship coming over, and her mother had been sent to Mendota in the first year. She did not know what had happened to her after that. When she was a child she heard nothing at all, but when she was older she heard that her mother had died almost right away in an influenza outbreak on the wards. Then she heard that she had been sent to work in the hospital laundry, for what other occupation might a crazy person pursue but laundry, and had been killed there in a terrible accident. Then she heard that she was free and walked the city streets like any woman who was sane and had remarried and had forgotten all about her daughter. So Olga, who was small and frail, grew up in a foundling home with neither brothers nor sisters nor aunts nor uncles. It was as if she had been dropped onto this earth from a hole in the sky. When she went out to work, she found a job in the kitchen of a boardinghouse. Right away she began to save up. She knew she wanted a place of her own. She had been married twice and had buried two husbands and was about to marry for a third time. It was her next husband’s idea that she would leave Milwaukee with him and go up to Price County and start a farm. But she had no intention of doing any such thing, for it meant leaving her tearoom behind and she had learned how important the tearoom was if she wanted to stand on her own two feet. She was not about to change her mind about that. So she thought she might learn to like the train, which she otherwise thought dirty and filled with people who smelled bad, and just see her new husband on weekends. Or she might let someone she trusted run the place for her a good deal of the time. She was sure whatever needed to happen could be sorted out. But she could not relinquish her freedom, of that she was very sure, for without freedom, a woman was nothing but a slave.
We played cards until we were tired of cards, and then Olga laid the deck in one of the drawers behind the kitchen counter. We looked at the pots and she handed me a rag and a tin of polish and together we polished the pots and then the forks and spoons and knives. We mended the holes in the kitchen towels and cleaned the cookstove. Still it snowed, and the drifts began to come up as high as the windowsills, especially where the wind blew. When that happened, Olga went outside with a shovel and moved the snow from the sidewalk into the street. She wore no hat and her hair grew white with snow and then her eyelashes. When she looked at me, working inside, she laughed and wiped her runny nose with a white handkerchief she kept in the sleeve of her blouse. Sh
e had given me some old clothes to wear, and in the evenings I sat and let the waistbands out as far as they could go. Time had passed and now I wore the skirts with their plackets gaping open and belted by a long piece of rope that I pinned to the plackets on either side. Over that, I wore a loose smock that had once been some big man’s shirt.
Late in the day, a tall young man in a short tan coat came to the window and looked in at us. He’d jammed a flannel porkpie hat on his head like an afterthought, and his hands were bare and raw. When he saw me, he tapped his fingers lightly on the glass. I stood and went to the door and held it open and asked him to come in. But he shook his head. “You come out,” he said, and I smiled and went to the back room and got my coat.
We walked away from the tearoom and away from the center of town. We passed away from the narrow streets filled with machine shops and tobacconists and greengrocers and shabby stationery stores. The snow thickened over us, and when I looked up it spiraled down in a fluttering wind. Edwin walked slowly so I could keep up. He looked at me and said my name and reached over and brushed snow from my hair. He smiled and I smiled back at him. He took my hand and I let him and he tightened his grip. It was very cold and yet we breathed as we walked and our clothes grew damp. We came to a park where the socialists had gathered on warm summer nights and told each other what it would mean when they had at last escaped their chains. Under the snow, the gazebo they used for a stage was a shrouded place, overhung with the bowed branches of evergreens. Black needles. Blackening sky. The snow driven down now in a straight line and the wind dying down. We came up the stairs under the dark branches and sat on the little wooden benches that ran around the inside of the gazebo. Here the afternoon was muffled and we were hidden from the street. Edwin sat down first and he put his arm around me. I lay my head against his shoulder. His coat was cold but his arm was warm and I felt myself fit to him. We stayed like that for quite a long time and then I closed my eyes and felt the wind rise and felt a spray of icy crystals against my cheeks. Out before us, a silent city made empty by snow, the quiet of a deep northern plain, the lake a still gray presence iced over and gone motionless at the shoreline. White land and white water stretching away over the horizon and not even the boats at the docks able to move, not steamship nor barge, nor ice cutter nor rowboat. And at dusk the sinking sun new and strange and at the place where the land met the deepening blue sky a glowing redness and the trees gone in a selfsame blur. Beyond the city lay the woods, their dark and shrouded trails, their limpet pools and hidden deer, the rising birds and the deep ferns of spring and the dusty dry leaves of fall, the long, deeply windswept places beneath the trees where the limestone rose and the river fell away and away and the earth itself turned under us like a place that could be home after all.
The End of Always: A Novel Page 29